Investigators say that safely reducing the frequency of blood draws in hospitalized children with fevers has historically not been a hospital priority despite the stress, pain and high rate of false positives associated with the procedure.

The researchers found that fostering cross-departmental collaboration and offering guidelines to clinicians helped reduce the number of unnecessary blood draws on some of the smallest and most vulnerable patients at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Clinicians were able to accomplish an immediate reduction in unnecessary blood draws using the newly designed checklist protocols, and they were able to sustain the reduction over time.